Unity Technologies has reached a licensing agreement with Nintendo which will allow the company to distribute the Unity engine to first- and third-party developers -- in addition to the engine's current 1.2 million registered developers -- for use in making Wii U games.

"A lot of our smaller developers are making really good games, but mainly for mobile platforms, on the web, on Steam, and so on," Unity CEO David Helgason told GamesIndustry International. "People are looking for the next thing, and, hopefully, with Nintendo, we can make sure that for many of them that will be the Wii U."

"It's [about] allowing studios to experiment more, and get more work done up front," he continued. "For a lot of these big studios, and even the not so big studios, it's about being able to let the designers and artists and creative people start experimenting from day one, instead of the day that the engine has been integrated... Cutting seconds and minutes from everybody's workload every single day is as big a deal on big productions as it is on small productions."

Providing more options for designers is certainly a positive. According to a press release, the Wii U deployment part of the agreement is supposed to become "widely available" in 2013.

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